I am conducting a research for an article that will be published on my Gamasutra.com blog.

If you are not a programmer please, ignore this topic!

Here is the question.

Imagine that an awesome opportunity to get a job in a game development company presented itself. The salary is high, the projects are interesting, the work conditions are good, and overall it is better and you want it.

All you need to do is to show the sample of your best code.

You are presented with 2 options:

Private option: send the sample of your best work by email so that ONLY THEY could see it.

Public option: showcase your work on their public forum, where EVERYONE could see it.

Please choose the statement which correlates with your thoughts better. Take a minute to think about the statements. All of them have upsides and downsides.

I am comfortable with both private and public options. I have no problem showing my work anywhere.

I am comfortable with private option, but not with the public one. I have no problems with sending my work by email to my potential employer.

I am comfortable with public option, but not with the private one. I have no problems with showcasing my work on public forums.

I am uncomfortable with both options. However I have no problems with showcasing my other, slightly less impressive works.

I am uncomfortable with both options. There is no way in hell I shall share any of my work with potential employer neither privately nor in public.

I will update this thread (or post) when the article goes live and provide you with a link, so stay tuned.

If you have any comments, thoughts or criticism, please leave a reply.

Help Otaku lose virginity! An upcoming crazy side-scrolling beat'em up game needs some cash.

PS
I have posted this poll in several subforums in order to ensure that the people taking it did not mix up (for example coders with artists). I hope the fact that this poll does not technically lie within the scope of this subforum will not be an issue, for it seemed like the most appropriate place. Thank you.

Posting the same topic across several forums is usually treated as spamming. My first reaction was almost to just flag this account as a spam bot without reading the post!
So far it's across 5 programming forums only...
I'm on the crappy iPhone interface, but another mod will probably have to clean this up...

I am posting it on several subforums because I am curious how programmers, artists, writers and game designers differ in regard of sharing their work.
I decided to place a poll in each subforum, to reach for a broader audience.

I am sorry for the inconvenience.
If I would post the poll only in one programming subforum, and in game design, writing, art and music subforum, will it be considered a violation?

Also I am sorry for any inconvenience. In no way did I wish to do harm. I apologize.

Edited by Arseniy1987, 18 April 2013 - 09:13 AM.

Help Otaku lose virginity! An upcoming crazy side-scrolling beat'em up game needs some cash.

All threads are visible on the recent-threads list which is where the spamming impression comes from. Multiple posts also create multiple separate discussions. You'll get multiple, but interactive, discussions if you keep it to a single thread, and that may improve the feedback you get.

If you want to, I, or any mod for the matter, can move this thread to another forum if you feel it's more suitable than the Game Programming forum. This one is quite general though and has a fair amount of activity so I'll leave it in here for the moment, unless you would like it moved somewhere else.

p.s. I'm not ignoring your PMs, I'm just replying to them here instead.

OK, In this case I suggest you leave this topic here and destroy the remaining ones. I will steadily, with several-days interval add up new polls and make sure they are called in a way only a group of people I'm interested in, will take it.
Thank you for your assistance and underastanding.

Edited by Arseniy1987, 18 April 2013 - 09:59 AM.

Help Otaku lose virginity! An upcoming crazy side-scrolling beat'em up game needs some cash.

generally speaking though, one does not just hand over intellectual property rights without a stack of signed NDA's, and an army of lawyers to back it up. unless one is in the business of giving away their best code.

and if one is in the business of giving away one's best code, one is not in business for long.

this of course assume one's best code has value to both parties.

if the code is of no value, sure give it away.

but if its of no value to the "interviewer", then it will be useless as a means of evaluating the candidate's skills, and also as technology that can be stolen.

if its something like a meeting where you show them your code, but they don't get a copy, that might be acceptable - with NDAs and lawyers to back it up.

any request like that coming from a company with a rep for heavy handed tactics such as MS or SIerra (now owned by EA?) would be a signal to proceed with caution.

generally speaking, when it comes to disclosing intellectual property of value (like a game engine, or the parts and techniques that make yours better), a paraphrase of Warren Zevon is not far off: "bring lawyers, guns, and money".

depends on the definition of "best code", if i built a great sample demo, i'd probably be willing to distribute it, as that's why i built it. If my best code is from a game i've built for commercial purposes, then i woudn't probably hand it over.

Most likely i'd either pass a pre-created demo designed directly for handing out code to potential employees, or i'll write a unique sample for them, I however won't distribute my code which is used in production.

It depends on what is meant by the "best" code. If a company is evaluating a candidate for a team, then the "best" code in this case can do next to nothing and still be the best: clarity, readability, structure, consistency would be the main evaluation points. Another case of the "best" code would be something that has the best value. However if a company is looking for this particular type of code, then they are not actually interested in the code, they are interested if you are awesome.

Thing is, my best code which does something productive looks the same as my code which does something boring. I would send the code for the boring case and a executable binary of the productive case. With a note: this is how my code looks like, and this is what I can do.

I believe my best code is in open source projects, so it is already public.

However I would find it odd that a company would even advertise the option of a public submission. Public applications fit some things, like a band looking for a new drummer or vocalist wants the applicants to post YouTube videos of them playing, but a programmer in the company would be eventually working under NDA's anyway, so it would in a manner be unbalanced and unfair to require the applicants to show their code in public. Offering both public and private options creates the impression (at least to me) that the private applications would be considered of less value, even if that wasn't the intention.

Every time you add a boolean member variable, God kills a kitten. Every time you create a Manager class, God kills a kitten. Every time you create a Singleton...